A happy customer purchases a cone in the Science Center yesterday. Ben and Jerry's donated the ice cream, and sales from the student-run stand benefited the American Red Cross.

Historical analogies are a ticklish business, especially when they are proposed while a fine, cruel dust still blankets the desolation of Lower Manhattan. So I will not compare the events of last Tuesday to Pearl Harbor, or to the sinking of the Lusitania, or the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarejevo, or any of the other terrible “turning points” in the long and bloody 20th century.

Perhaps this will be remembered, as many pundits are already proclaiming, as the end of the “post-Cold War era,” and the true beginning of the 21st century. Perhaps decades hence, our generation will look back wistfully on those gilded days before the September Massacre, just as those who survived the First World War nostalgically recalled the vanished era before Europe plunged into blood and darkness. Perhaps I will come to regard my own 2001 summer—spent, like the summers of so many Harvard students, amid the topless towers and teeming streets of Manhattan Island—as a fleeting glimpse of a golden age, a vision of Babylon before the judgment of the Lord came upon it.

Perhaps. But for now, at least, we cannot say that this is a turning point, because we do not know what we are turning toward. All that we can say is that it is a moment of truth, a moment when certain things become clear, when the illusions and prejudices that cloud our gazes lift ever-so-briefly, to reveal the reality beyond.

This is a moment of truth, first and foremost, for the United States of America, awakened suddenly from a comfortable slumber. Since the end of the Cold War or before, we have wrapped ourselves in dreams—of peace without struggle, of power without sacrifice, of victory without cost. We have heaped up wealth and lived in meretricious splendor, while our politicians squabble over imaginary “lockboxes” and our popular culture dredges the gutter for lowest-common-denominator fare. And we have fought our wars from a distance, dropping bombs from 30,000 feet and lobbing missiles across continents, while at home we have occupied ourselves with endless, FX-laden tales of the “greatest generation,” those stalwart heroes of an earlier time, when wars were fought by men and not by cruise missiles.

But now the boom is gone, the dot-coms are shuttered, the Age of Clinton has come to an end, and the time has come again to decide what kind of nation we will be. Will we be the America that our enemies—the bin Ladens and Iranian mullahs, the fascist despots of Beijing and the tinpot tyrants of the Third World—enjoy painting us as, the champion of depravity and crass materialism, of corporate bottom lines and gaudy, hyper-capitalist excess, the America whose culture drowns in a sea of sadism and sensuality? Or will we be the America of our own fondest dreams, the champion of liberty at home and abroad, the nation whose commercial zeal is tempered by faith, hope and charity? The choice, for better or worse, is ours to make.